OMG its the Machinima BLog!

10 days..

Ok 10 days left and the first part is only at 56%…. Gona make it to the deadline? First part yes, second part no. Gona make it after christmas vacation? 75% chance.

I’m currently busy with the 6th page (out of 9 in part 1 and of 16 in total). Filming of this page will commence tomorrow. I’m doing some homework right now (why don’t those teachers understand that I’m terribly busy 😉 ) but anyway.

Ok as for the tutorial part, here it comes:

After you read trough all the pages here and learned on how to do a proper animation, here’s how I did it and how I exported it into Gmod

First of all the SDK must use engine version 2006 and point at half-life 2 (and NOT HL2 DM!!!)

Put all the voices you want animated into \steam\steamapps\username\half-life 2\hl2\sound\YOURSUBMAP

Then, when you’ve added phonetics to all those sentences copy and paste them all in here:

\steam\steamapps\username\garrysmod\garrysmod\sound\YOURSUBMAP

When making a new animation always put them in \steam\steamapps\username\garrysmod\garrysmod\scenes

Then when making an animation choose (when using the wav file option) file name: sound/YOURSUBMAP/yourfilename.wav (don’t forget to add .wav!!!) This way the map structure is preserved and the animation doesn’t mess up.

Once you created the animation, save and close faceposer. And start up Garrys Mod.

Start up a single player level which loads very quickly (for example this one) then spawn an NPC, and open the console while pointing at him. Use the following code:

ent_setname ACTORNAME

Since you specified ACTORNAME at the beginning when you started a new animation in faceposer these 2 must of course be the same.

Then (you can stop looking at the NPC) enter the following code: ent_fire ACTORNAME setexpressionoverride scenes/YOURSCENENAME.vcd (dont forget to add .vcd!!!)

Now the NPC will play the animation you made in a continuous loop. Just record (with fraps for example) 1 or 2 of those loops and you can edit them with your video editing software.

To change the NPC’s animation into the standard use ent_fire ACTORNAME setexpressionoverride idle

This will give an error and that results in the NPC going into its default behaviour.